Playing with Fire

If the actors don't look upon the movie as too much of a technical stretch, the main man behind the camera does. Bowman's primary challenge is to expand The X-Files for the big screen, mounting elaborate action sequences while also finding a way to introduce faces familiar to fans--such as William B. Davis' ever-ominous Cigarette Smoking Man, a key link in the government-alien collaboration--to X-innocent moviegoers. "It all has to do with building atmosphere," says Bowman. "People who wander in with buckets of popcorn may not know how long and hard Mulder and Scully have fought Cigarette Smoking Man, but if I do my job right, they'll know that this butt-puffing little bastard is an enemy to fear the moment he appears on screen."

Bowman, like the actors, is looking beyond The X-Files; he'll be aboard for the next TV season, but he's also fielding offers for other features. You get the feeling that despite the hard work of everyone involved, the Files remain central only to Carter's creative life. His way of fighting the future has always been to play out a chancy paradox: Carter is a maker of hugely popular entertainment, yet all of his crucial influences derive from cult or obscure sources. He was a surfer in the '70s when surfing wasn't cool, editor of a surfing magazine when being an editor--well, was being an editor ever cool, unless you're talking Cary Grant in His Girl Friday? Carter did his TV apprenticeship on shows like the hideous '87-'88 Joseph Bologna sitcom Rags to Riches. And he took much of the original inspiration for The X-Files from Kolchak: The Night Stalker, a mid-'70s TV flop now better known as a Carter icon than for its own highly uneven if instructively seedy charms.

When it is pointed out that what's great about the TV X-Files is that it is an exact example of what the film critic and painter Manny Farber has called "termite art"--"art that always goes forward eating its own boundaries, [leaving] nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity"--Carter's normal murmur rises with excitement. "Farber is one of my favorite writers and artists! People could do a lot worse than looking for the roots of the X-Files sensibility in his work."

And when it is then suggested that the pitfall of an X-Files feature film is that it will inflate to the size of what Farber derisively called "white elephant art," full of "recognizable details and smarmy compassion...[and] fear of the potential life, rudeness, and outrageousness of a film," Carter grows quiet. "Yes," he says finally. "But even if that happens, I should at least make sure the elephant steps on the right people."